Busy week for fans of tracking illegal downloading activity, a group that totally exists:

1. A woman is being fined $220,000 for “illegally sharing songs” via Kazaa, in a court case that dates back to 2005. No word on whether the tracks were by Vanessa Carlton or that band that covered “Gin and Juice” who everyone thought was Phish, but totally wasn’t Phish.

2. According to a report put together by Musicmetric, the United States leads the world in illegal downloading by a wide margin (U-S-A! U-S-A!), and that Americans love stealing Drake, who may or may not be a “f*ckin’ piece of sh*t,” songs more than anyone else’s. Score one for Chris Brown?

The Digital Music Index is a report produced by Musicmetric, a data and analytics company that maps the trends and preferences of music fans around the world. The data collated and crunched is then supplied to the music industry to provide a better understanding of who and where fans are, and which artists are best engaging with fans through online channels.

In addition to looking at licensed services such as Spotify, Deezer, 7Digital and iTunes, Musicmetric look how artists engage with fans through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and sharing sites such as Soundcloud, Last.fm, YouTube and blogs. But naturally what we are most interested in is their analysis of worldwide BitTorrent networks. (Via)